Restaurants | 5 February 2005

Off to the Gun, the Docklands gastropub. It’s a brisk walk from Surrey Quays station. Well, I say brisk but of course it is impossible to get anywhere briskly these days, what with the swarms of swarming immigrants swarming all over the streets and everything. They are everywhere. Everywhere! Indeed, just this morning I shook three out of my hair and if I’ve caught them, then you can almost guarantee the rest of the family have them too. So it’ll be off to Boots for that special stinky shampoo and then all that combing, combing, combing. Such a faff. I blame our son. Attending an inner-city multicultural school as he does, he’s always bringing them home. I also, by the way, found an entire family of asylum-seekers living in the kettle and 27 Kurds who’d set up camp behind the curtains. It is terrifying. Indeed, according to those think-tanks that project such things to put the fear of God into the congenitally thick, if Britain’s population continues to grow at its present rate the country will explode by tea-time tomorrow and then turn into a giant runny cheese which the French will come over and eat. You may scoff. You may say this is xenophobic scaremongering at its most pernicious. But, believe me, you won’t be feeling quite so clever when this business makes camembert of us all.

Anyway, to the Gun with two friends who would be nameless if, say, their parents had failed to call them anything at birth, perhaps having other things on their mind, but they didn’t, so they are Caroline and Mark. They are nice, decent people, the sort whose families go back generations in this country, which is what counts, after all. The Gun is down a little side street of surprisingly pretty old cottages and sited on the river with a view across to the Millennium Dome.